Truths suppressed by the Establishment and society generally, and analytical overviews of reality to deepen understanding. All contents copyrighted. Brief quotations with attribution and URL [jasonzenith.blogspot.com] permitted.
Check out my other blog at taboo-truths.blogspot.com

Wednesday, July 27, 2016

Donald Trump's campaign manager, Paul Manafort, is a known swindler who stole $19 million from a Russian businessman. The businessman has been trying to get his money back for eight years now. He had to hire a private investigator just to try and find out where Manafort was hiding.

This is not some crazy "Internet rumor" or "conspiracy theory" from "a blogger sitting in his parents' basement in his underwear," as establishment propagandists like to sneer when they want to discredit (as distinct from disproving) some inconvenient information. This is from the Washington Post, an organ that sits at the apex of the U.S. bourgeois propaganda system. [1]

According to an article in the Post, Manafort and an accomplice, Richard Gates, swindled the Russian businessman, Oleg Deripaska, by tricking him into "investing" with them. Manafort's mark has been futilely trying to get is money back. In fact, the victim can't even get an explanation of where his money is from the thief Manafort. [2]
Manafort has long been involved with state criminals such as Reagan, Bush the Elder, U.S.-backed Philippine tyrant Ferdinand Marcos, and the recently-ousted pro-Russian Ukrainian president, Viktor Yanukovych. You would have thought that this last bit of unsavory business would have occasioned loud denunciations in U.S. media, but naaah. What coverage there is is quizzical and faintly admiring. (Tells you something abut the moral and ethical sewer the U.S. elites inhabit.) Manafort was also a helpmate to Jonas Savimbi's terrorist UNITA, a U.S.- favored Angolan group trying to overthrow the government there until Savimbi finally met his maker. [3]
The curious- and damning- thing is, that despite the prominence and "respectability" of the Washington Post, the rest of the propaganda system has virtually ignored the story. This despite all the hand-wringing about what a disaster a Trump presidency would be. (One must wonder, given how the corporate propaganda system, which likes to call itself "the media," has been doing a bit of hand-wringing over the prospect of a Trump presidency, mainly over his unpredictability, and his failure to get on board the Hate Russia bandwagon. To the contrary, he apparently is quite favorably inclined towards Putin, and is suspected of having prospective business dealings in Russia. The leaking of Democratic National Committee emails to WikiLeaks, proving that Hillary Clinton's handpicked hit-woman, DNC chair and Florida Congresswoman Deborah Wasserman-Schultz, deliberately orchestrated a campaign of sabotage against Senator Bernard Sanders' campaign for the party's presidential nomination, has been blamed, so far without any evidence presented- unless you consider the opinions of unnamed "experts" to be evidence, the few identified ones hedging their identification of Russia as the "culprit,"- this outing of information we are all entitled to, as it affects our lives, by being blamed on Russia, is adduced as more proof that Trump is somehow in Putin's pocket. [4]

It's quite natural that Manafort should wind up at Trump's side. Manafort is a scoundrel with a history of service to corrupt reactionaries, and Trump, even with his idiosyncracies, certainly qualifies as one of those. And both Manafort and Trump are rip-off artists, although from what we currently know, Trump is much more accomplished as one.

There's Trump "University," There's using Polish immigrant construction workers at a fraction of the normal pay, without even providing them hard hats. There's cheating his casino workers out of overtime pay. He didn't pay contractors who built his casinos, causing some of them to go out of business. (Great job creator you are, Trump!) There's fleecing banks by taking out loans and not repaying them.

Trump brags about his numerous bankruptcies. He presents this as a savvy business practice, gaming the system. In other words, he plotted in advance to go heavily into debt and declare bankruptcy,

That means he planned to rip people off by "legally" stiffing them for what they were owed. Contractors, workers, banks, and business "partners."

Trump almost never uses his own money. He started out using his father's money, then went on to using the money of saps who "invest" with him, and of dumb bankers. Conniving, corrupt politicians grant him favorable tax "abatements" (exemptions from what by law he would otherwise pay) and various regulatory preferences.

Trump doesn't even make his own charitable contributions. Others fund his "foundation," and his own "donations" over the years have consisted of letting people use his golf courses gratis for charity events, which he then takes a tax write-off on! He had the chutzpah a few months ago to loudly bray about a million dollar donation to veterans' organizations which he then didn't make, until the Washington Post forced his hand by exposing him. (Naturally he excoriated the Post for this terrible terrible deed they did!)

What I always found most stunning over the decades was how the New York City media relentlessly promoted this obvious egomaniacal hustler. The only exception was the weekly paper the Village Voice, which consistently practiced actual journalism and reported on his scams. [5]

There have long been creeps, immoral con men (Clinton, Obama), and reactionaries feigning a human face (Reagan, Nixon, the Bushes) in U.S. politics, but Trump is new in that he doesn't even wear a mask. The fact that millions of people are drinking his obviously rancid, poisonous Kool-Aid forces one to the conclusion that there are far too many imbeciles in America for comfort.

And America is a nation that threatens the whole world.

Slipping in and out of the shadows: Election manipulator

and swindler Paul Manafort.

Paul is the PERFECT guy for me!

1] I am writing this from my very own home, and I'm not wearing underwear, I'm BUCK NAKED! Take THAT, bourgie propagandists!

The Washington Post has long been in a permanent rivalry with the New York Times to be at the very top of the media pecking order in terms of status and influence. As it is based in the capital city of the U.S. empire, Washington, D.C. (District of Columbia), it is also a sort of hometown paper for the the imperialist nomenklatura and national political elite.

Its editorial stance is consistently quite reactionary, unlike the New York Times, which is "liberal" mostly and reactionary partly. Its reporting is frequently quite ideological. The people who write it would probably be too self-conscious to do so naked, especially if they knew there were hidden cameras observing them.

4] An ideologue/apparatchik by the name of Anne Applebaum pushed this line very hard yesterday on "The Takeaway," a "public" radio show on government network NPR, hosted by John Hockenberry. Applebaum was miffed that people were paying any attention at all to the content of the emails instead of piling on Putin and leaving the Clinton machine out of it. How unfair that Wasserman-Schultz should be targeted. To Applebaum, the only story here is Russian subversion of a U.S. election.

Applebaum is an unreconstructed, career Cold Warrior, as her official bio on the Washington Post website makes clear. The way people like her have dealt with the disappearance of the organizing principle of their lives, the Evil Soviet Union, is by substituting Russia for the SU. Problem solved!

For an example of Hockenberry's journalistic ethics, see "John Hockenberry Illustrates Lying By Omission." To be fair, Hockenberry isn't all bad. He's more of a mixed bag. He "balances" normal, even humane journalism with reactionary crap and power-sycophancy.

5] There are hundreds of articles on the Village Voice website exposing Donald Trump. And Wayne Barrett, who reported for the Voice for many years, wrote an important book about Trump, as have a few other authors. David Cay Johnston has also been on Trump's tail.

Saturday, July 16, 2016

Autocratic Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has quickly crushed a badly organized military coup, apparently instigated below the general staff level. The rebellious army units neglected the first rule of any successful coup- immediately neutralize the ruler you're trying to overthrow. That's Job One. Erdoğan was vacationing in southern Turkey, and it should have been easy to seize him as he was far from the capital, Ankara, or Istanbul.

Instead the coupists fired on the Parliament with tanks- not sure what the point of that was. They managed to kill about a hundred civilians, and it's reported by the regime that 105 coup troops were killed, and 1,500 taken into captivity. It's claimed that police units were able to defeat units of the coup attempt. A coup helicopter was shot down, and one flew to Greece with officers of the coup seeking asylum. (Greece and Turkey have a hostile relationship, for historical and contemporary reasons, the contemporary ones centering around the Turkish invasion of Cyprus. Both are members of the U.S.-bossed military alliance, NATO, making them uncomfortable bedfellows at the same time.)

Erdoğan called on his followers to turn out in the streets and confront the coup elements, requiring them to defy coupist instructions to the population to stay indoors. Apparently thousands heeded Erdoğan's call, complicating matters for the coup side.

Erdoğan, true to his temperament, vowed that the "traitors" would "pay a heavy price." (Mass executions, anyone?)

Torture of prisoners has long been routine in Turkey, both in political and non-political cases.

Military coups have been common in Turkey since World War II. They are generally done in the name of protecting the secular nature of the Turkish Republic. [1]

Erdoğan, an Islamist who leads an Islamist party, and whose base is the religiously-oriented segment of the populace, a segment that has been growing both in numbers and in religious conservatism in Turkey, has been gradually eroding that secular aspect of the Turkish state. His rise to power represented in part the liberation of the religious from the suppression they suffered under the Ataturk legacy.

So the handy defeat of this coup may well spell the end of secular power in Turkey.

The so-called "Western democracies" all rushed to back Erdoğan, predictably, since they want to stay in his good graces for their own reasons (and they have sensitive power-sensing antennae, so they could detect which way the wind was blowing on his coup attempt). The Europeans have a deal with the regime for Turkey to act as a garbage bag for unwanted refugees from Syria and elsewhere. The U.S. is running military air operations out of Incirlik air base in Turkey. [2]

Which brings me to a second big mistake of the coup plotters. They didn't clear their plot with the U.S. first.

1] The contemporary state of Turkey was founded on secularist principles by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, a revolutionary army officer, and first president of the new nation he is credited with founding, the Republic of Turkey, (the core of the Turkish Ottoman Empire). After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I (1914-18, during which time the Turks conducted the Armenian genocide under cover of war), Ataturk led a successful war against the Allies from 1919-22 to create the new Turkish nation. The name "Ataturk" was bestowed on him by Parliament in 1934 and means "Father of the Turks." By law no other Turk may use the name.

Ataturk abolished the Caliphate and sharia courts in 1924. A failed assassination plot against him in 1926 provided him an opportunity to hang various political opponents.

2] U.S. Secretaryt of State John "Skull and Bones" Kerry issued noises supporting Erdoğan, German Chancellor Angela "The Iron Mouse" Merkel did likewise, and newly-anointed British Foreign Secretary Boris "BoJo" Johnson called the Turkish Foreign Minister to give him a verbal pat on the back.

Thursday, July 14, 2016

China’s claims over huge swaths of the South China Sea are illegal under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.

So ruled the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, Netherlands. [1]

China is a signatory to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea and thus is legally obligated under that treaty to abide by decisions of the Court. [Fat chance.]

In reaction to the Court's ruling, China's government and media (which is part of the government) have gone into paroxysms of denunciation and hysterical vows to ignore the ruling. Even before the official ruling, Chinese propagandists were issuing crazed rants, for example a front-page editorial spewed out the day before the Court issued its decision, by the so-called People’s Daily, blaring a conspiracy theory line that the case was a US and Philippine plot against China, a sneaky trap set by the US and the Philippines with the Court acting as an accomplice.

[I might interject here that, contrary to my somewhat misleading title, China isn't just now becoming an outlaw nation. Its invasion and absorption of Tibet was a criminal act also. And it has long been guilty of numerous, severe abuses of human rights. Oh, and it invaded Vietnam in 1979, an act of unprovoked aggression. (Actually the "provocation" was that Vietnam had the temerity to overthrow the mass murdering Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. The U.S. was also mad at Vietnam for doing that.)]

China did not defend itself in the Court, obviously because it knew it didn't have a leg to stand on legally or factually, and it had already determined in advance that it would ignore the Court's decision. China claims, absurdly, that most nations support its illegal position on the series of disputes in the South China Sea.

The other nations whose feet China has been stomping on regarding their territorial claims and rights of free navigation and fishing, are Malaysia, Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, Brunei, Taiwan (which China insists is a mere "province" of China), and Vietnam, that last one a country China has repeatedly invaded over the centuries, including in 1979 with the connivance of the Carter regime of the U.S. [2]

China is a lovely neighbor, eh?

Only the Philippines had the guts to bring suit (so far) against China. It filed the case last year.
China is trying to grab undersea oil and gas, as well as hog the fish in the area. It has been caught illegally fishing in the territorial waters of other nations in the region. In return, its navy chases the fishing boats of other countries out of international waters, which it illegally claims as Chinese territorial waters.

Part of China's scheme has been creating artificial islands, reinforced with military runways and bases, around which it then claims territorial waters. The Court rejected this tawdry scam in its ruling. [3]

But the Court, lacking a navy, has no enforcement powers over China, It can't even freeze Chinese assets or bar China from the international financial system -only the U.S. has those powers.

There is a superceding law over all the formal laws and treaties in "international relations." It's an unwritten law; The Law of the Jungle. The principle of that "law" is, Might Makes Right.

In other words, as long as you can get away with it, it's "legal." Because you just declare it so.
Put another way, the powerful decide what the rules are, regardless of what's written down on some piece of paper they solemnly signed and ratified (aka a "treaty").

Such as when the regime of Bush the Younger declared U.S. torture wasn't torture, merely "enhanced interrogation techniques," a smarmy, slimy euphemism persisted in to this day by the U.S. corporate propaganda system, known by the opaque and evasive term, "the media."

And invading Iraq on a trump-up, transparently fraudulent pretext wasn't criminal aggression. (But the U.S. has been invading places since 1812. It's a tradition, you see.)

Speaking of the U.S, so far the U.S. response to China's contemptuous spitting on its international obligations under the treaty it signed, has been quite muted. Nothing from Obama, or even John "Skull and Bones" Kerry, the U.S. Secretary of State. Just an anodyne, milquetoast burp from State Department chief mouthpiece John Kirby, saying, while not being able to comment yet on the meritsof the case, the U.S. supports the rule of law and peaceful efforts to resolve maritime disputes. (The merits were already decided, Kirby, by the body empowered to decide them! And the Court vote was 5-0. Sounds pretty definitive to me.)

"The United States strongly supports the rule of law. " [Actually it only supports it when it's in the U.S. "interest." Otherwise fuck the law. See for example invasion of Iraq, torture, subversion and overthrow of "hostile" government, assassinations, gross human rights violations domestically and abroad, etc. In fact, the U.S. doesn't even respect its own domestic laws or Constitution. Its police are virtually above the law, for example. Its police and secret police routinely violate the "guaranteed" rights of the Constitution, and always have. Officials break numerous laws all the time with impunity. If a big enough scandal erupts from lawbreaking, such as Reagan's criminal Iran-contragate conspiracy, a price is paid- namely "embarrassment." Man, if "embarrassment" were the only penalty for crimes, I'd be a bank robber! (Not really. Unlike the people in power here, some of us have a moral compass.)]

More from Kirby:

“In the aftermath of this important decision, we urge all claimants to avoid provocative statements or actions,” he said, splitting the non-existent difference. Now you all behave yourselves.
"We are still studying the decision and have no comment on the merits of the case... As provided in the Convention, the Tribunal’s decision is final and legally binding on both China and the Philippines. The United States expresses its hope and expectation that both parties will comply with their obligations." [My emphases. So even-handed! The ruling went almost totally against China. And why does the U.S. "have no comment on the merits of the case"? The merits have been decided, you just effectively admitted, Kirby.]

In fact, much of the statement is written as if the Court decided nothing. It urges the parties to "clarify" their claims and "work together to manage and resolve their disputes." Well they tried that already, that's why the Philippines went to Court! China is openly defying the ruling of the Court, despite the fact that they signed a treaty agreeing to accept dispute resolution through the Court. Now what's the U.S. gonna do about it? [4]

It has alliances, official and unofficial, with most of the countries on that list that China is pushing around. China has declared, quite furiously, that it intends to push ahead with its absorption of the various islands, reefs, rocks, and vast ocean area it claims as its property. The other nations cannot successfully confront China's military unless the U.S. military backs them up.

Best case scenario is that Obama steps up to the plate, and China backs down in a confrontation. But what happens in a decade or two, when China's military is stronger, maybe much stronger?

But there's no reason to assume Obama will even risk a confrontation at present. His punking out when Assad, the Butcher of Syria, crossed Obama's "red line" over using chemical weapons, does not inspired confidence. Obama is good at attacking the weak. Confronting even the somewhat strong is too risky for his taste. Backing down from China will be a green light for increasing Chinese aggressiveness.

They've thrown down the gauntlet to the U.S. So far the U.S. is pretending not to notice.

1] The Court issued a press release and the judgment, which they call an "Award," as English .pdfs, July 12. Click on the indicated links for those. The judgment is 501 pages, by the way.

2] I remember well how the Chinese dictator at the time in 1979, Deng Xiaoping, came to the U.S. to be officially feted by president "Jimmy" Carter, and immediately after Deng left, China invaded Vietnam. Being a "cynic," that is, someone who isn't brainwashed by the crap in this country, I thought at the time that there was probably some connivance between the U.S. and China, given the timing, and the grudge the U.S. held against Vietnam for not surrendering after the U.S. killed at least 3 million Vietnamese, dropped 6 million tons of bombs on Vietnam (three times the tonnage the U.S. dropped in World War II), permanently poisoned the land with defoliants contaminated with carcincogenic, neurotoxic, and DNA-damaging dioxins, and the commisions of numerous war crimes and atrocities. Carter said the U.S. didn't owe Vietnam any apology (much less reparations) because "the destruction was mutual." (Yeah, the U.S. bombed Vietnam, and Vietnam shot down some of the bombers. So it's even.)

The Carter regime of course lied through their teeth and denied they'd had the slightest inkling of the impending invasion. (And this with the massive U.S. global surveillance system. Even if the Chinese couldn't resist sharing their plan with the U.S. so they could mutually gloat in advance, U.S. communications intercepts and satellite and airplane surveillance couldn't possibly have missed the military build-up on Vietnam's borders and the preparations for invading.) As it turned out, the Vietnamese beat back the Chinese invaders.

Some years later, the sinister Count Dracula lookalike, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a Russian-hating Pole who was Carter's eminence grise as head of the "National Security Council," couldn't resist boasting about how Deng had told the American rulers of the impending invasion. The Carter regime imperialists couldn't have been happier.

Brzezinski, by the way, successfully plotted to lure the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan, another crime he unwisely boasted about. [See Brzezinski in his own words, from Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, although I can't vouch for the English translation. Also "THE STRATEGIC MIND OF ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI: HOW A NATIVE POLE USED AFGHANISTAN TO PROTECT HIS HOMELAND," whose author interviewed Brzezinski, former CIA Director Robert Gates, who oversaw an operation to arm violent Afghan religious fanatics, the so-called Muhajideen, "Holy Warriors," starting six months before the Soviet invasion, high government apparatchiks Walter Slocombe, David Aaron, Dennis Ross, Leslie Gelb, leading Democratic Party operative Bob Shrum, Jim Mowrer, and journalist Hedrick Smith.

Here's Brzezinski's flippant dismissal of the immense "blowback" the U.S. and much of the rest of the world has suffered from the policy he sold to his stupid boss, president Carter:

“What was more important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of central Europe and the end of the Cold war?”
("Afghanistan: The Soviet Union's Vietnam," Aljazeera, April 23, 2003.)

Carter was and has often been sold to the U.S. public as a "peanut farmer," but more pertinently he was a career naval officer who served on atomic missile submarines. He was steeped and marinated in the culture of U.S. imperialism and anti-Soviet ideology. He increased the military budget by 50% during his single four-year term in office, a fact that is never mentioned in the U.S.

Carter also initiated the contra terrorist war against Nicaragua. And before that, to get around Congress, he secretly had Israel supply arms to the dying regime of the evil dictator Somoza. On top of that, Carter declared that the Shah of Iran, rated as the worst dictator in the world by Amnesty International when he was in power, as a "good friend." As with Somoza, he tried to save him (and was considered a weakling by U.S. fascists when that proved impossible).

Jimmy Carter, getting to live to a ripe old age in his 90s, unlike so many of his victims, has reinvented himself (with U.S. media help) as some kind of Great Humanitarian. Yeah, right.
By the way, Deng Xiaoping ordered the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989. Hey, you can't make an omelet without breaking a few thousand eggs! (The "omelet" being the continual rule of bastards in power.)

4] I've reprinted the entire State Department press release here, so you don't have to have your ip address snatched up by the U.S. government and spyware planted on your computer. But if you insist on verifying the accuracy of it, click on the title below:

The decision today by the Tribunal in the Philippines-China arbitration is an important contribution to the shared goal of a peaceful resolution to disputes in the South China Sea. We are still studying the decision and have no comment on the merits of the case, but some important principles have been clear from the beginning of this case and are worth restating.

The United States strongly supports the rule of law. We support efforts to resolve territorial and maritime disputes in the South China Sea peacefully, including through arbitration.

When joining the Law of the Sea Convention, parties agree to the Convention’s compulsory dispute settlement process to resolve disputes. In today’s decision and in its decision from October of last year, the Tribunal unanimously found that the Philippines was acting within its rights under the Convention in initiating this arbitration.

As provided in the Convention, the Tribunal’s decision is final and legally binding on both China and the Philippines. The United States expresses its hope and expectation that both parties will comply with their obligations.

In the aftermath of this important decision, we urge all claimants to avoid provocative statements or actions. This decision can and should serve as a new opportunity to renew efforts to address maritime disputes peacefully.

We encourage claimants to clarify their maritime claims in accordance with international law -- as reflected in the Law of the Sea Convention -- and to work together to manage and resolve their disputes. Such steps could provide the basis for further discussions aimed at narrowing the geographic scope of their maritime disputes, setting standards for behavior in disputed areas, and ultimately resolving their underlying disputes free from coercion or the use or threat of force.

Hooboy! This China thing is gonna be sticky! State Department Flack-in-Chief John Kirby. Maybe he should have taken the day off.

Friday, July 08, 2016

The sniper attack on police in Dallas at a Black Lives Matter Rally yesterday is going to result in revenge attacks against progressive activists, especially BLM activists, as surely as night follows day. There will also be more random police violence as police adopt a "defensive" mode of preemptive violence.

In the preceding two days before the sniper incident in Dallas, two black men were murdered in two U.S. cities. First in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, Alton Sterling, a 37-year-old man whose "crime" was selling CDs on the street to support his five children, was tackled by police, pinned to the ground, and then shot five or six times in the chest. The police cannot lie their way out of this only because a bystander recorded a cellphone video. Of course, they will still get away with it. Sterling allegedly had a pistol in his pocket- perfectly legal in Louisiana, a state that boasts of having the laxest gun laws in the U.S., no permit needed to carry a gun.

The next day, another black man, Philando Castile, was shot dead in his car over a broken taillight. This occurred in a suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota, named Falcon Heights. (Perhaps the police there see themselves as birds of prey, swooping down on hapless "blacks.") Castile informed the cop that he had a licensed gun, and when the cop asked for his driver's license, Castile reached for it and the cop filled him full of lead. Again, if a passenger in the car, Castile's girlfriend, hadn't been recording on her cellphone, the usual cover-up would have succeeded. As it is, the police seized her cellphone on the spot and treated her as an armed and dangerous criminal, but her phone was live streaming the video to her Facebook account. The police immediately deleted her account (which they have no right to do, but in the U.S., the police do whatever they want to certain categories of people, categories that increasingly include most of the population). However, others had already copied the video feed. [1]

The snipers in Dallas shot 12 cops, killing 5, and two civilians. Two suspects were arrested because they were seen driving rapidly from the scene. The police have refused to identify them, or say whether rifles were recovered in their car. Doubtless they are being brutally tortured right now. A third suspect was cornered, allegedly made incriminating remarks, and while police "negotiated" with him, sent a bomb-carrying robot in his space and blew him up. Apparently their thirst for vengeance was so powerful that they couldn't wait him out and thus have the opportunity to interrogate him.

Initially disinformation was put out that this alleged sniper shot himself to death after being cornered. The first hint that this wasn't so came from Wade Goodwyn, one of the few honest NPR reporters. (NPR being the U.S. government's national radio network, which is partly sponsored by corporations and listener donations.) This morning Goodwyn didn't toe the "suicide" line but said the man died.

The establishment media has been quite mendacious about the murders of Sterling and Castile, including the British government propaganda network, the BBC. I will have some analysis of that forthcoming.

Meanwhile, the police, who are already permitted to continue killing people with impunity, and much more, will now ramp up their brutality and killings, and the general repression of dissent, especially dissent against police violence, will rise to a more intense level.

Tuesday, July 05, 2016

The feudalistic regime of the House of Saud, which arrogated to itself the right to claim ownership of an entire country constituting most of the land area of the Arabian peninsula, just experienced some blowback for its spreading globally of a noxious, intolerant, extremist religious ideology, Wahhabism. The blowback came in the form of three suicide bombers, who struck in three separate Saudi cities near the end of the "holy" month of Ramadan.

One bomber took out four Saudi security guards with him, and wounded five more, outside "the prophet's mosque" in Medina, "the second holiest city in Islam," as the catechism goes. Another bomber, a Pakistani man who came to Saudi Arabia 12 years ago to work as a driver, according to the Saudi regime, blew himself up outside the U.S. consulate in Jiddah, wounding two guards. The third bomber targeted a mosque in the predominantly Shiite city of Qatif. (Wahhabism and its terrorist spawn are Sunni. Both the Saudi regime and ISIS persecute Shias. The regime executed a leading Shiite cleric in January for leading protests for more rights and democracy, and ISIS considers Shiites "apostates," abandoners of Islam, and worthy of death.)

This is far from the first time people even more extreme than the Saudis have violently attacked the regime. There have been other attacks on religious sites, shootouts with state security, and assassinations.

So repression, even the extreme repression of a Saudi Arabia, cannot totally suppress attacks by determined zealots willing to sacrifice themselves or take great risks. This is one reason the eventual overthrow of vicious regimes does not result in humane new orders. It is the fanatics who have the gumption, will, and commitment to fight repressive regimes. The decent, moral people are cowed, imprisoned, driven into exile, or killed.

All across the world, cancerous offspring of Wahhabism have sprouted. First came Al-Qaeda, then various Taliban organizations and movements in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, whose military aided and abetted the creation of terrorist organizations to use against India, and provides a haven for the Taliban, policies that in recent years have come back to bite them. (Frankenstein's monster slipping out of the control of the creator.)

In the Philippines there is Abu Sayyef, founded by a veteran of the U.S.-Saudi-Pakistai anti-Soviet crusade in Afghanistan instigated by Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski and vigorously pursued by the Reagan regime in the 1980s.

Another of the numerous Sunni jihadist organizations is Jemaah Islamiyah, which also operates in the Philippines, and in Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore.

Indonesia, the major country in that region, is also the site of Islamist terrorist activities, such as the Bali nightclub bombings of 2002 that targeted Australian and other tourists and killed 202 people. (A lot fewer than the approximately one million Indonesians murdered in the CIA-inspired anti-communist military pogrom of 1965.) Members of Jemaah Islamiyah were convicted in the bombings.

In Nigeria, Boko Haram has wreaked havoc. (The brutality of the various Nigerian military regimes led directly to radicalizing Boko Haram.)

In Libya there is a war on against ISIS by Libyans fighting back.

In Bangladesh, the regime's tolerance of Islamofascists murdering bloggers, writers, and secularists by hacking them to death with machetes has suddenly come with a price tag, as Islamofascists just attacked foreigners in a restaurant. This is not only scaring off tourists, but is causing foreign clothing companies to consider taking their production business out of the country to saver slave-wage states.

Other attacks in just the last few days include a truck bombing in Baghdad that slaughtered over 200 people so far, and the first attack in Malaysia credited to ISIS, a grenade lobbed at a club that wounded 8 people. [1]

Egypt's tourism industry has been devastated by Islamofascist attacks there, including the destruction of two airliners in flight so far, first a Russian one, then an Egyptian.

In Turkey, the most recent bombing there, in the Istanbul airport by armed suicide bombers, is being blamed on ISIS, even though ISIS hasn't boasted its responsibility, which they usually do. (NPR and other media have been claiming the attack "has the hallmarks of ISIS" or even "all the hallmarks of ISIS." No it doesn't. Which doesn't mean ISIS didn't do it, of course.)

So while ISIS is being systematically squeezed geographically in Iraq, where it declared its "caliphate," and is being fought by the Kurds in both Syria and Iraq, fanatics inspired by it have been undertaking attacks on civilians around the world.

We can expect this situation to last for years. Which is great news for the U.S. political elites of both parties, and the secret police/military combine. That combine sought and deliberately created a never-ending "war on terrorism" in order to gain huge increases in both funds and powers. They initiated this operation, with malice aforethought, by arranging to allow al-Qaeda operatives to hijack planes on September 11, 2001. In order to create "another Pearl Harbor," in the words of one of the seminal planning documents for this criminal enterprise, agents of the U.S. deep state planted demolition charges in three steel structures at the World Trade Center and detonated them on that day, as has been proven beyond doubt by Architects and Engineers for 911 Truth, an organization of 2,000 experts.

Thus the program to Create a More Perfect Police State continues, under both Democratic and Republican regimes.

Sunday, July 03, 2016

I notice an irony that those creating it are sure to be unconscious of. The same ruling elites that patronizingly purr at the masses under their feet that "change is good," to pacify those masses and disarm them psychologically when the majority, who increasingly have to struggle to keep their heads above water economically, are under attack economically, those elites suddenly don't like change at all when it's a change they don't want. If "change is good," why isn't a change in the European Union good? Why isn't political change in Britain good?

"Change is good" is the narcotic propaganda fed to Americans when "free trade" treaties directly assaulted their economic interests. Told they had to compete against dirt cheap third world labor, "change is good" was one of the propaganda lines spewed by establishment media. Whenever the government of the rich launch a new salvo in the unending class warfare against the rest of us, we are instructed to take it lying down because "change is good."

Well okay then! If "change is good," then stop your WHINING about BREXIT, bourgeoisie! Shut up and suck it up!

Friday, July 01, 2016

Looks like Britain may have the European Union bosses over bit of a barrel. They can't actually eject Britain from membership in their dysfunctional club. Britain has to invoke Article 50 of one of the EU treaties to begin the process of withdrawal. British Prime Minister David Cameron announced in the British Parliament that he would leave it to his successor to initiate that process. (Assuming his successor chooses to do so, which he is under no obligation to do. The just-completed referendum does not legally compel the British government to actually withdraw from the EU.)

Cameron announced he is stepping down in October. So that's already 3 months before anything can happen. He also referred to negotiating before Britain invoked Article 50. That gives Britain a good deal of leverage in extracting relatively favorable terms from the EU regarding trade, immigration, and social benefits for immigrants.

Meanwhile, there's been an odd disconnect between the political events and the behavior of stock markets. Every day, the political chatter from and about Britain is that it is "leaderless," since a clear successor of the Tories to replace Cameron hasn't been selected, and the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has a rebellion on his hands in his own party. Labor MPs are overwhelmingly calling for his resignation, and his shadow cabinet has resigned. We're being told that months, or even years, of uncertainty lies ahead.

Stock markets are supposed to hate uncertainty. And yet, after declining for the first two trading days after the Brexit referendum on Thursday June 23, stocks fell on Friday and Monday, in the U.S. about a total of 6% in the broad averages. Then they went up strongly the next 3 days in a row, recouping all the losses. This morning U.S. stocks are up again, for the fourth day in a row, although anything could happen by closing. As so often, the stock market confounds by defying its own putative "logic."

One excuse (aka "reason" or pseudo-explanation) for the rally is that traders expect central bank easing as a result of the Brexit vote. In other words, they assume that central banks (the Fed in the U.S.) exist to facilitate ever-rising stock markets by providing financial sugar for the professional speculator class. Perhaps some thought a measly 6% decline created a "bargain" situation. Given the extremely short-term perspective of "the market" in recent years, that probably is at least part of it.

How to square the continuing hand-wringing and bitter condemnations by financial and political commentators over the Brexit referendum outcome, along with their doom-and-gloom predictions for the economic future of not just Britain but even the entire world, with the giddy reversal of direction by stocks globally? Could it be that the elite chatterers and "economic experts" are dead wrong? Since they fetishize markets, surely they must defer to the "judgment" of those markets.

Following Moody's another "rating" agency, S & P, has downgraded the credit rating of the British government. As I stated in my previous essay, these credit "rating"agencies have shown themselves to be criminal enterprises by their complicity in the packaged mortgage securities fraud, rating junk mortgaged Triple-A. They deserve no credibility whatsoever.

Even the British pound rallied back to $1.35, from $1.32, although right now it's back to just under $1.33. But the gloomsters ignore the positive of that. It means British exports are cheaper, just boosting British exports. That in turn benefits at least some British workers, and certainly the export businesses. It also will boost tourism to Britain, since it means vacationing in Britain becomes cheaper for Americans and Europeans using the Euro. The downside is more expensive imports, and it makes foreign travel more expensive for Britons, who will get less foreign currency in exchange for their pounds when abroad. Net, Britain gains economically from a cheaper currency. And I doubt it will fall anywhere near the low of 1987, when it dropped to $1.04 U.S.

A looming political question is what Scotland will do. Scotland voted strongly for Brexit, and doesn't want to lose the alleged advantages of EU membership. There has been talk of another vote on Scotland independence, (Which requires the permission of the British Parliament, unless Scotland wants to fight a war of succession.) Well, the British empire has been shedding pieces of itself for a century, perhaps it's high time for another piece to molt off.

One worry going forward: now that the Tory former London Mayor Boris Johnson has dropped out of competition to succeed Cameron, the egregious Home Secretary Theresa May very much wants the PM job. She's a repressive authoritarian who has consistently pushed for more powers for the British secret police agencies, including the NSA's little brother, GCHQ (General Communications Headquarters, an electronic spy agency that works hand in glove with the NSA as one of the "Five Eyes," the electronic secret police organizations of the U.S., UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand). She also lobbies hard for more repressive laws. And if Britain leaves the EU, the privacy laws of the EU and the European Court of Justice will no longer exert a restraining influence on the British ruling class' thirst for more repression. At this time she has but a single rival to take Cameron's place, and that is Justice Secretary Michael Gove, an erstwhile ally of Boris Johnson in the pro-Brexit camp.

The Nightmare Scenario: The Remorseless Theresa May as Prime Minister of Britain.